In truth Nato owes Vladimir Putin. Big time. While the alliance's members would much rather he had not sent troops into Ukraine, in doing so, the Russian leader has reaffirmed the alliance's raison d'être, purpose and legitimacy at a time when many were asking whether it had a future.
The summit in Wales was supposed to be about marking the winding down of the Afghan operation, asking questions about Nato’s future and, for the US, cajoling member states to assume more of the financial burden – today it comes up with 73 per cent of the $1 trillion Nato member states’ spend on defence, up from 68 per cent six years ago.
Just four members in 2013 topped the mutually agreed defence spending target of 2 per cent of GDP. And things are slipping – European defence budgets fell $50 billion between 2008 and 2012 and are projected to fall further. (Ireland, not a Nato member, spends as little as 0.5 per cent of GDP on defence)
Meanwhile, Russia has increased its military spending by half in the past five years.
That reality and Putin’s Ukraine incursion have changed everything.
With the Soviet Union’s demise, the idea that the 28 Nato states no longer faced a threat of invasion from Russia – in the 1990 Russia-Nato accord the two pledged to work in partnership – was taking root.
Nato was evolving from an organisation preoccupied with territorial defence and the chapter 5 mutual guarantees that each of its members gave to defend one another if attacked, to one finding a role in out-of-theatre operations on the world stage, whether in Afghanistan, in the Balkans, fighting piracy off the African coast or in air strikes against the Gadafy regime.
Turning point
The summit was an important turning point, a pivot back to defending Europe, completing Russia’s transformation from partner to a potential adversary. The rising tension over Ukraine has been grist to the arguments of newer members like
Estonia
and
Poland
which have been for some time urging the alliance to deploy substantial troop contingents on their territories against a possible Russian threat.
Reluctant yet to abandon its commitment to Russia not to do so, the leaders have opted instead to create a rapid response force of 10,000 capable of deploying there at short notice.
The Ukraine crisis has also prompted Ireland's fellow EU neutrals Sweden and Finland to take a significant step closer to Nato membership in signing agreements to allow Nato deployment and training operations on their territory.
Russia’s sense of encirclement by what is seen as an ever-encroaching Nato is a neuralgic issue for Russian politics. Nationalist politicians point to what they see as alliance bad faith in taking in the Baltic countries and now half-opening the door to Ukraine and Georgia.
In part, that is about the loss of prestige and regional predominance from the days of the Soviet Union, in part a perception that this is a real threat to Russian territory.
Yet Putin’s preoccupation with Nato expansion is in reality nothing to do with such an imagined, and politically utterly unreal, threat of a Nato invasion, but rather with the reality that Nato membership of states formerly under Russia’s wing inhibits his ability to dictate their politics as the old Soviet Union did.
Putin regards the “rights” of 25 million Russians in minorities in new countries on Russia’s rim as a legitimate basis for, if necessary, military intervention. Ukraine today.
Putin last week told the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso: “If I want, I will take Kiev in two weeks.”
He invaded Georgia and still controls part of it. He crushed Chechen rebellion. Russia controls Transdnistria in Moldova.
Message’subtext
Last week he publicly called into question the legitimacy of Council of Europe member Kazakhstan. At issue, a trade dispute, but the Kazakhs will have heard and understood the subtext of the message.
Baltic countries like Estonia have understandable reason to feel that without the Nato’s chapter 5 guarantee, Putin would feel equally free to “defend” Russian minority interests within their sovereign borders by similar means.
That reality puts a different perspective on the knee-jerk anti-Nato polemics of our own anti-war movement.
Simply caricaturing Nato as a brutal expansionist tool of western (largely US) imperialism is to take no account of such legitimate fears. While Ireland may not feel it is under similar threat and so does not need Nato’s security blanket, some EU member states, and hence the EU itself, do.
“The really ironic aspect here is that a re-energised, restrengthened Nato is Vladimir Putin’s worst nightmare, and yet it’s his tactical actions that have done just that,” notes James Stavridis, Nato’s commander from 2009 to 2013.